Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

Ford has a plan to help cut car emissions, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with batteries, hybrid powertrains, or clever engine technology. Instead, the company is focusing on improving the parking experience, and its answer involves a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country and remote control vehicles enabled by off-the-shelf commercial 4G LTE.

At first glance that might not sound like it has much to do with reducing vehicle CO2 emissions, but according to Ford, their data shows that hunting for parking spaces in urban environments can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. To find out more about what Ford has been working on, we spoke with Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford. He told Ars about a pair of research projects that the car maker has been working on as part of a larger program called Smart Mobility.

Smart Mobility involves 25 different experiments and pilot studies around the world, but these two have both been developed in conjunction with a team at Georgia Tech here in the US; Ford has had a long-running relationship with the group, which Tinskey describes as being analogous to the company’s research and advanced modeling arm for sustainability. According to Tinskey, Smart Mobility exists at the intersection of mobility and sustainability, with the overall goal of finding novel ways to reduce CO2. "When you look for places to do that, you start looking at antiquated things like parking, where people waste a lot of time, and a lot of CO2," he said.

Parking Spotter

"Nothing’s really changed in more than 80 years," he said, pointing out that the problem feeds on itself as drivers hunting for a parking space cause congestion. "They’re going slow, and they’re distracted," he said, "so people behind them have to go slower too." Now, there are some parking lots that recognize this problem and do something about it: if you’ve flown out of Baltimore-Washington International airport you may have noticed the more expensive parking lot has real-time displays showing the number and location of empty spaces on each floor, making it a cinch to find a spot. These systems use ultrasonic sensors, but they’re expensive—about $500 per parking bay, which may explain why they’re not more common.

Ford’s solution is called Parking Spotter, and it’s meant to address a gap with existing navigation systems, which Tinskey says are great at getting us from point A to point B but then fall down on the job because they don’t have a way of showing where to park with a minimal amount of searching. Now, there are plenty of tech startups working on mobile parking solutions, but they’re almost all focused on making it easier for drivers to pay once they’ve found a space. This focus on billing and revenue generation for the owners of parking spaces makes a certain amount of sense. App makers (and the people who invest in them) want a revenue stream, and they do that by signing up with the people who own the parking meters as a way to improve payment, taking a cut.

That’s great if you’re a municipality or own a parking lot and want to introduce variable pricing based on demand, but it’s less good if you’re just an average joe looking for somewhere to leave your car. While there’s little commercial pressure for third parties, a car company that solves this problem will have found a good way to enhance its customer’s experience, hence Ford’s interest. Parking Spotter rather cleverly leverages existing technology already present in any Ford vehicle fitted with the company’s Parking Assist package. Parking Assist (which enables a car to parallel park without the driver controlling anything) uses ultrasonic sensors on either side of the car to gauge where it can and can’t go.

"What we’ve done is purchased a database of all the known parking spaces in the US and geomapped it, so we know if a vehicle crosses the right GPS coordinates we know it’s moving into a parking lot or a parking space," Tinskey said. When a car drives past a location that Ford recognizes as a parking space, the ultrasonic sensors get turned on and map out occupied and unoccupied spaces, uploading that data to create a near-real time parking map. "It’s very low cost because we haven’t added any hardware," Tinskey said, "and if we can figure out a good business model around this we think that, potentially, all vehicles could benefit. The idea is somewhat similar in concept to the way Nokia HERE plans to utilize customer cars to constantly update the ultra-high resolution maps it’s developing for autonomous driving.

It’s a rather clever idea, but we do wonder whether Ford will have to start subsidizing data connections for its customers’ cars. As to when we might see Parking Spotter at work in parking lots, Tinskey told Ars that 2015 will see the company build a small fleet of test cars while it determines if there is a real business model for the idea.

Remote Repositioning

The second Georgia Tech study represents an intermediate step between the cars you and I drive today and the autonomous four-wheeled robots that we’re going to drive in the future. Tinskey is quick to point out something we’ve now heard from almost everyone in the industry on the topic of self-driving cars: the technology is almost ready, but policy isn’t. Until the laws and regulations are in place, self-driving cars are going to remain the preserve of a handful of small pilot studies. Until then, a human is going to need to be in the loop, but Ford decided to find out whether it was absolutely necessary for that human to be present in the car at the time.

The idea was inspired by the way that bike sharing schemes (familiar to residents of London, Paris, New York, Washington, and elsewhere) reposition their bicycles overnight. Georgia Tech is in the midst of transitioning from a driving campus to a walking one, and as a result has seen a proliferation of golf carts to replace department vehicles. But the carts weren’t being used very efficiently, many spending long periods of time parked up by protective custodians. Tinskey said they decided to see if commercially available 4G LTE networks were up to the task of remote control without any special bandwidth.

As it happens, the answer is yes. Using off-the-shelf wireless networking and AT&T’s LTE network, camera-equipped golf carts can be driven around Georgia Tech’s campus from several thousand miles away in California. "We’re very encouraged by the results," he said. "We were able to remotely control the carts, but also optimize cameras, the compression algorithms, and we think we’re able to replicate the experience of driving that cart remotely."

Although the original idea for Remote Repositioning involved redistributing fleet vehicles, Tinskey also thinks the system could work as a virtual valet mode, maybe working in conjunction with Parking Spotter. The thought of a car that could go off, park itself, and then come pick you up later does indeed sound rather tempting.

At this point, remembering the (not very good) James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, we asked Tinskey whether we might eventually be able to remotely control our own cars via smartphone? "We might need to file a new patent and list you on the IP," Tinskey said, before explaining that the remote driver would need a multi-monitor setup with a wheel and pedals for the foreseeable future. "We have been learning a lot, for example, moving the cameras from the front of the cart to behind the steering wheel—also informed by driving games—because if you don’t see the steering wheel you have a much harder time driving the cart," he said. A lot of work would evidently be needed to translate that to a smartphone app.